SEO is crucial these days. Several tools are there for it. But before opting for one, we should know all about the relevance of that tool. One such tool is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
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Introduction to Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
In this article, we will discuss an essential guide about screaming frogs. These days having accurate SEO is something that every company wants.
Not only a guide, but we are going to discuss much more. We will discuss its installation, features, analysis, and more. Overall we will try to cover everything one must know about it.
Visit: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
About Screaming Frog
By checking your website for common SEO flaws, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider can assist you in boosting onsite SEO.
Like Google’s crawlers, Screaming Frog enables you to crawl any website, including e-commerce sites. However, this SEO spider tool boosts your sites crawlability by providing significant onsite data.
It produces easily readable statistics and reports. You can quickly identify the areas that require improvement on your website with Screaming Frog’s more straightforward domain.
Installing and Setting Up the Tool
Now let’s walk through the installation process of the Screaming Frog –
- Download the Screaming Frog. You can crawl 500 URLs at once.
- It works with Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu. You can go to their website for the link.
- After that, double-click the SEO Spider installation file you downloaded and proceed as instructed by the installer.
- You can purchase a license that lifts the restriction on 500 URL crawls, expands configuration options, and grants access to more capabilities.
There are some steps that you need to follow on different platforms –
Installation on windows
Download the SEO Spider’s most recent version. ScreamingFrogSEOSpider-VERSION.exe will be the name of the file. The file will likely be downloaded to your downloads directory, which is conveniently accessible via File Explorer. At 100% completion, the download may stop so that Windows can run a security check.
- Launch the executable file. Double-click the downloaded file by going to your Downloads folder in File Explorer.
- If you don’t want to install in a location other than the default, click “Yes” and then select “Next” on the box that appears.
- Click “Next” once more.
- To begin the installation, click “Install” right now.
- You will see a screen of the copied files.
- To start the SEO Spider, click ‘Finish.’
You can install it as well by following these steps –
To find ‘Add or remove programmes’ in the Control panel, click the Start button in the lower-left corner of your screen and type ‘add.’
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is on the list of apps. Pick “Uninstall” from the drop-down menu by clicking the three dots to the right.
You will decide if you want to remove all of your crawls, settings, and license data by uninstalling.
Check this out: Dareboost SEO Tool Review
Installation on macOS
First, download the Screaming Frog SEO Spider application. The following screen will appear when you double-click the downloaded file in the Finder’s Downloads folder.
Drag the Screaming Frog SEO Spider application icon from the left to the Applications folder on the right after clicking it. Most macOS applications reside in the Applications folder, which copies the Screaming Frog SEO Spider program.
Click the x in the top left corner of this window to close it now. Locate ScreamingFrogSEOSpider in the Devices section on the left of Finder, then click the eject icon next to it.
You can uninstall it by –Â
Apple has an excellent manual about using the Finder to remove apps. Click on ‘Applications’ on the left-hand side of the window.
Locate the “Screaming Frog SEO Spider” and select “Move to Bin” from the context menu.
Drag the application to the trash instead. After moving an app to the trash, select “Finder > Empty Bin” to delete it.
Read also: How to Perform a Website Audit with Seobility for Better SEOÂ
Conducting a Basic Website Crawl
It costs nothing to download and use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which can crawl 500 URLs simultaneously. You can purchase a license that annually lifts the 500 URL crawl limit for £199.
Access to the setting, saving, and opening crawls is also made possible by a license.
There are two primary ways to crawl –Â
- The “List” mode – enables you to upload a list of URLs.
- “Spider” mode – automatically crawls websites.
By entering the homepage into the “Enter URL to spider” area and pressing “Start,” you can launch a standard “Spider” crawl.
This will audit and crawl the supplied URL and any additional URLs found through HTML links on the same subdomain’s pages.
The crawl will update in real-time, and at the bottom of the application, you can see the speed and the total number of URLs finished and unfinished.
You can pause and resume the crawl at any time by clicking pause. You can save the crawl as well.
Click “Mode > List” to upload or paste a list of URLs if you’d prefer to crawl a list of URLs rather than the entire site.
Steps
In standard crawl mode, the SEO Spider will only scan the subdomain you specify. It will automatically treat other subdomains as external links.
For example, if you enter https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk in the ‘Enter URL to spider’ box at the top and click ‘Start,’ you can crawl the Screaming Frog www. subdomain.
You can change the top filter from “Subdomain” to “Crawl All Subdomains.”
This implies that if other subdomains like us.screamingfrog.co.uk or support.screamingfrog.co.uk existed and were internally linked, they might also be crawled.
The SEO Spider will automatically crawl all subdomains if you begin a crawl from the root (for example, https://screamingfrog.co.uk).
You can find faults on a website, such as broken links, redirects, and server failures.
Alternatively, changing the mode of the SEO Spider and uploading a list of URLs to crawl can all be used to better control your crawl.
See also: Netpeak Spider Audit Tool Review: 2022
Advanced Features and Customization
Some of the features are –
- Â Quickly crawl a website to identify 404 errors and broken links. Send the mistakes and source URLs for correction to a developer or bulk export.
- Identify redirect chains and loops, find temporary and permanent redirects, or upload a list of URLs to audit during a site migration.
- Â Look over each page’s page titles and meta descriptions to look for those that are long or short, duplicates, or that are not optimized.
- Â View URLs that robots.txt, meta robots, or X-Robots have blocked Noindex and Nofollow directives in tags and audit canonicals.
- Â Find missing alt text for images and view all photos in a crawl’s alt text.
- Analyze the website for exact duplicate pages and “similar” content nearly identical to other pages.
- Crawl dynamic, JavaScript-rich websites and frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue.js, using the integrated Chromium WRS to render web pages.
- Examine internal linking and URL structure by visualizing the site architecture as a tree graph and using interactive crawl and directory force-directed diagrams.
- Create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps quickly, with sophisticated configuration options for URLs such as last changed, priority, and change frequency.
- By auditing the international setup, find widespread mistakes and problems with hreflang annotations in HTML, via the HTTP Header, or in XML Sitemaps.
- Â Analysis For Core Web Vitals (CrUX field data), Lighthouse metrics, speed opportunities, and diagnostics at scale, connect to the PSI API.
- You can schedule a crawl to run automatically, once, or at predetermined intervals within the SEO Spider.
- Compare Crawls and staging to see what has changed between crawls and to track the development of SEO potential and concerns. Using sophisticated URL mapping, contrast the staging and production environments.
- Â Connect to the Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs and retrieve user and performance metrics for each URL in a crawl.
- Find everything you’re looking for in a website’s source code using custom search HTML, whether it be code, text, or Google Analytics code.
- Utilise CSS Path, XPath, or regex to extract any data from the HTML of a web page. This could involve new titles, prices, SKUs, or social media meta tags.
- Access a staging website using web forms, basic authentication, or digest authentication.
- Run crawls programmatically using the Command Line to interface with your internal systems.
See also: The Difference Between Google Analytics And Search Console Data
Analysing Crawl Data and Taking Action
The SEO Spider shows the crawled data in tabs in real-time. The ‘ Internal ‘ page includes all information found during a website crawl. To view the information in the different columns, scroll up, down, and to the right.
Each tab’s filters help to further refine data by type and any potential problems that may find. The charges each focus on a different factor.
You may see any detected 404 pages, for instance, by using the “Client Error (4xx)” filter and the “Response Codes” tab.
To fill the lower window pane, click on the tabs at the bottom after clicking on URLs in the top window.
These tabs offer extra information about the URL, including its in-links (pages linking to it), outlines (sites it links to), photos, resources, and more.
Conclusion
Overall we have discussed the guide of Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Before getting into this world, knowing about it is crucial. We have mentioned the basic information that will be helpful.
So this will remove your confusion about the application, and you can use it for your sole purpose.